preëxisting musical devices to give his finale maximum impact. He looked back, in particular, to the transcendent finale of Mahler's Third Symphony, which is as cosmically free of irony as anything ever written. Mahler's coda is in the same key as Shostakovich's, and it has the same repetition of triads, the same device of timpani repeatedly pounding a two-note figure (D and A), even the same touches in the orchestra- tion (trumpets piercing the general mass of sound). It's telling that conductors slow the drumbeat in the last three bars of the Fifth, in defiance of Shosta- kovich's score but in accordance with Mahler's-they are getting the two symphonies confused. This is not to say that Shostakovich's ending is an alto- gether happy one. By adding a fiercely pulsating A in the strings and the winds, he gives his celebration a seething edge. But it is a celebration all the same. Evidence for the ultimately trium- phal character of the Fifth crops up in, of all places, "Shostakovich Recon- sidered." That book excerpts some lec- tures by Maxim Shostakovich, the com- poser's son, who has long been an au- thoritative conductor of the symphonies. "The Fifth Symphony is his 'Heroic' Symphony/' Maxim writes. He quotes his father as follows: "The hero is saying, 'I am right. I will follow the way I choose.' "The interpretation that Sho- stakovich offered his son contradicted what he told Volkov-the ending, he implied, was sincere and in his own voice. The symphony, in other words, is the conventional Romantic story of an individual overcoming adversity. That Soviet propagandists co-opted it as a glorification of Stalin shouldn't stop us from hearing glory of a different kind. The hero of this symphony has the free- dom to imagine joy, if not to experience it. Call it an angry joy-a lunge for a bet- ter world. T he Fifth Symphony is a statement of awesome confidence, but it emerged from conditions of fear. Dur- ing the remainder of Shostakovich's career, fear took its toll. The success of the Fifth, and the even greater wartime success of the Seventh Symphony, the "Leningrad," made the composer a potent propaganda resource for the Soviets, and he began to feel trapped in his position. Mter the war, he failed to produce the Beethovenian "Victory" symphony that Stalin had been expect- ing, issuing instead a largely frivolous Ninth Symphony with a vaudeville fi- nale. A second campaign against for- malism erupted in 1948, and Shostako- vich suffered another sickening fall from grace. A new trend emerged in his deal- ings with the regime: instead of lying low, as he had done after the "Lady Macbeth" crisis, he went out of his way to humble himself in public. At the 1948 proceedings against formalism, during which most of the accused com- posers avoided personal appearances, he read aloud a speech that was stultifYing in its banality and disconcerting in its masochism. He later claimed that the text of this speech had been forced on him, but other participants in the affair were apparently able to speak in their A 1 . :;:'i h .. .r: ' 0i{;!!1j;';:f:ijl l. .. t ast a st @.'A ,y-stem t at;lttMl!JIll1. "to use. , .,', , :j,;!:r it '.:: ; J:i " ..." .,'} : ,:;;i;;;,;;i,;,:::;:,t:::llf:r'''''':,:,:i;rr. '; r, " (Sounds' reat alread doesll-tt;,"mt'. ',...,:-",':':.. --..' ;,.'". ;; :.-;1 ;:! ,.< ji i1 %i ii! ... :..:...:.......:...:.....:..:...... .. .....-.-"' .:. ...-.>(-..::: '; : it: '17&B m . :'i-#.",::"YF; 7'/'.'j' ;:;,:': ':::, ':: , .:': .,,,<<:"" "" , ,. ..ç.;z!J:fkv' "",,' , ",-..: ....:..::_ _ ." ,. .., , , :::,.,""'. ;;:: :"":,... , """ ,' ; " , : , : , : , ::""',..." ::'''';''''.;;.:::.:,:;grm :; '. . 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